MXM #2

Reported by Peter Saint-Andre

Back in March, we decided to hold an informal "Monthly XMPP Meeting" among developers in our community. Here is a brief report on the second such meeting, held today (April 14) in the jdev@conference.jabber.org chatroom (the archived discussion log is here).

The points raised included:
- Is this a misuse of service discovery?
- Will this make entity capability caches less useful because they will be too large to search easily?
- Does it make more sense to publish this information via the Personal Eventing Protocol using the old software version format?

There is general agreement that this proposed modification to the core XMPP roster management protocol is in good shape. There are still a few edge cases to figure out, especially the empty roster case.

People like this because it will improve the reliability of communications across the network. Now we need to go forth and implement.

Bidirectional server-to-server connections

As defined in RFC 3920, XMPP requires two TCP connections for each server-to-server ("s2s") link. This is sub-optimal. We decided that we need to hold a dedicated discussion session about s2s fixes and improvements (server dialback, multiplexing domains over a given stream, etc.). We agreed to make that the focus of the next Monthly XMPP Meeting, tentatively scheduled for May 5 (add it to your calendar here).

My impression is that it is quite valuable to hold these meetings. I especially found it helpful to have a more general community discussion about XMPP Extension Protocols that are currently in Last Call or under heavy development, because it gives people a chance to talk about them in real time rather than only on the standards@xmpp.org mailing list.

So expect us to keep holding this kind of online meeting over the coming months.